How to charge for embroidery

Why copying a price list fails

Search for embroidery prices and you will find shop lists charging per thousand stitches, per design, per item or per hour, and no two of them agree. They disagree because they are not pricing the same thing. One shop runs a twenty-head machine with cheap thread and a low rent; another runs a single head, digitizes in house and turns small orders around overnight. A rate that covers the first shop can lose money at the second.

So the useful question is not what embroidery costs in general. It is what this job costs in your shop, on your equipment, at your wage. Once you know that cost, charging for embroidery is just deciding how far above cost you need to price to make the work worth doing.

The five numbers every quote needs

Machine runtime per item: how many minutes the machine actually runs for one piece, timed on your own equipment rather than taken from the design software’s speed estimate. Handling time per item: the minutes you spend hooping, loading, trimming and unloading, which on small runs can exceed the sewing time. Your hourly shop cost: what an hour of the shop has to earn to cover wages and overhead. Materials per item: blank, thread, backing and anything else the piece consumes. And a markup you set yourself.

Add machine runtime and handling, divide by sixty and multiply by your hourly cost to get the labor for one item. Add materials. Multiply by the quantity, then add any one-time cost such as digitizing exactly once for the whole order. Apply your markup to that batch total and divide back by the quantity. That per-item figure is your price, and every input in it is a number you can point to.

Where digitizing and small orders fit

Digitizing is the charge people forget, and it behaves differently from sewing. You pay for it once no matter how many pieces you run, so it belongs on the order as a fixed cost rather than inside the per-item price. Spread across two dozen shirts it barely shows; on a single sample it can be most of the bill. Pricing it per order lets you explain that to a customer instead of quietly losing it.

The same logic covers minimums. A one-piece order takes nearly the same setup as a dozen, so the honest price per item is higher, not because you invented a small-order penalty but because the fixed cost has fewer pieces to spread across. Showing the quantity comparison makes that visible and gives the customer a reason to add pieces rather than an argument about your rates.

What not to include

Do not build a per-stitch rate out of someone else’s numbers and then apply it to your shop. If you prefer to charge per thousand stitches, derive that figure from your own timed jobs: take designs you have already sewn, divide what the machine time cost you by the stitch count, and use that as your rate. Revisit it when your wages, thread prices or machine speed change.

Leave out anything you cannot support. Tax, shipping, payment fees and garment costs vary per order, so add them as line items when they apply rather than baking an average into every quote. And label the result as an estimate until you have confirmed the design and the stitch count from the digitized file — the stitch count estimator page explains how to get a planning figure before that file exists.

Do the arithmetic on your own numbers

The embroidery pricing calculator turns machine runtime, handling time, your hourly shop cost, materials and a markup you choose into a per-item cost and a suggested retail price. It runs in your browser, quotes in USD, and it never supplies a stitch rate of its own — every figure starts from a number you enter.

Related on this site: Embroidery stitch count estimator.

Questions about how to charge for embroidery